Jamee Crusan was born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania and has spent the last 10 years living in Cleveland, Ohio. Crusan received her BA in Media Communications from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a BFA in Photography and a BFA in Communication Design both at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Crusan’s primary focus is within the realm of photography and the medium in which she mainly works. Her focus continues to be on women’s issues, race, gender and the paradoxes between them. She is highly influenced by media, propaganda the the contradictions they have on our daily lives.

Some are works retained in the permeant collection of the Jack, Joseph and Mort Mandel Foundation and the Oatey Wing Gallery. Publications include the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Scene. Crusan also has a photographic design studio, Sisu-Studios in Cleveland.

She is a second year dual masters candidate at California College of the Arts in the Masters of Fine Art Social practice program and Visual and Critical Studies.

About Jamee Crusan’s Thesis Project

The Double Edge of Visibility and Invisibility: Cassils and Queer Exhaustion

Recent queer theory has coined the term “queer exhaustion” to name the stressful dialectic of social and political visibility and invisibility as experienced by queer, trans, and intersex individuals in contemporary American culture. Examining performances by the trans artist Cassils, I consider what we might gain, as well as lose, through queer exhaustion. Cassils’s work speaks to the traumas of invisibility and the dangers of visibility, but also to ways in which empathy is created in the spaces between denial and exposure, and how queer sexuality can function as a form of resistance against the straight white cis-patriarchy.